Word: existentialist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...classical Christian moralist, the teachings of the church are moral imperatives that apply always and everywhere to men faced with an ethical decision. To the modern-day existentialist, all guidelines are irrelevant; he argues that any authentic decision must arise spontaneously from man's inner sense of what the moment demands. To day, a number of Christian theologians expound a third way-halfway between the two previous paths-which they call "situation" or "contextual" ethics...
...mentally blocking off any speculations about its origin or significance, any memories of similar experiences. By this act of epoche, a deliberate suspension of judgment, Husserl felt that the mind could eventually intuit the essence of the object being studied. Husserl's bafflingly difficult approach influenced such modern existentialist philosophers as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre...
...reality. In The Conditions of Philosophy, a current examination of the discipline, Mortimer Adler charges that the analytic thinkers abandon "first-order questions" that metaphysics used to ask-such as the nature of being, causation, free will-and are concerned mostly with second-order problems of method. The existentialists, on the other hand, continue to ask large-size questions, but because of their man-centered approach they are indifferent to systematic thinking. Thus, for both movements, a question such as "What is truth?" becomes impossible to answer. The logical positivist would say that a particular statement of fact...
...society has doubled since 1955, Evangelical theologians sometimes admit that they feel like voices crying in the wilderness. "Never has theology stood in more public disrepute than it does today," laments Carl Henry. "The ecumenical dialogue accords a prominent platform to all sorts of theologians-secular, linguistic, dialectical, existentialist-while the theology of historic Protestantism is seemingly boycotted as if it were a heresy, and the only heresy at that." Nonetheless, Evangelicals remain confident that their belief in God's infallible word is the only way for Protestantism to remain true to its history and spiritual heritage...
...death, modern man is especially troubled by the prospect of a meaningless death and a meaningless life-the bleak offering of existentialism. "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem," wrote Albert Camus, "and that is suicide." In other words, why stay alive in a meaningless universe? The existentialist replies that man must live for the sake of living, for the things he is free to accomplish. But despite volumes of argumentation, existentialism never seems quite able to justify this conviction on the brink of a death that is only a trap door to nothingness...